Mr. Monk on the Couch (12 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“L
ike what?” Stottlemeyer asked. “Drugs? Jewelry? Cash? Microchips? Bonds?”

“I have no idea,” Monk said. “But I believe there was something very valuable hidden in the couch and he wanted it back. He went to Cheryl’s to get it but discovered that she’d donated the couch to the thrift shop without knowing it contained his valuable item.”

“So he broke into the store to find out who bought the couch and tracked it here,” Stottlemeyer said.

Monk nodded. “I think the first thing he did was kill Costa when he came in and then went to the couch to retrieve his object. But it was gone. When he didn’t find it in the couch, or elsewhere in the house, he assumed that Cheryl had it all along. So he went back and tortured her into telling him where it was and then killed her.”

“It’s still speculation,” Stottlemeyer said, “but it makes a lot more sense than the stain theory.”

“I think they are on equal footing,” Monk said.

“Maybe the lab guys will find some trace of the valuable object in the couch or its stuffing,” Stottlemeyer said. “Meanwhile, we’ll dig into Cheryl’s life and see if we can find out the identity of this mystery person who was close enough to her to use her couch as a safe.”

“I’ve heard of stuffing money in your mattress,” Jerry said, “but never in your couch.”

“Maybe she had a water bed,” I said.

Jerry laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Stottlemeyer sighed. “Okay, I think we’re done here.”

“I’d like to stay and help them clean up for a while,” Monk said.

“We’re in the middle of a murder investigation, Monk.”

“Can’t I stay for even a little while?”

Jerry sighed. “I appreciate your enthusiasm, Adrian, but actually it’s probably better if you go. It looks like we’re going to have to pull up the hardwood floor in the bedroom, and that’s more of a demolition and construction job than a cleanup anyway. No offense intended, but it’s a tight space here as it is, and the fewer people around the better.”

“I understand,” Monk said, slouching with disappointment. “Could I at least stay and help Corinne clean up the kitchen while the captain drives Natalie back to the station to get her car?”

Jerry nodded. “Of course.”

Monk practically ran down the stairs before Jerry could change his mind.

“I’ve never met anyone who liked cleaning so much,” Jerry said.

“Consider yourself lucky,” Stottlemeyer said and walked out, leaving Jerry and me alone for a moment.

“You look great,” he said.

“So do you,” I said. “You wear that biohazard suit like it’s a tuxedo.”

“That’s good to know, because this is what I was planning on wearing Friday night.”

“Oddly enough, so was I,” I said.

“You’d look good in a burlap sack,” he said.

“That was my second choice.” I gave him a smile and headed for the stairs before he could start another round of flirtation. I can only take that kind of banter in small doses, mainly because I’m not creative enough to keep up my end.

I went outside and got into the car with Stottlemeyer, and we went back to the station.

I picked up Monk forty-five minutes later outside of Costa’s place and dropped him off at his apartment. By then it was early evening, so I called it a day and Monk didn’t argue with me about it.

I went home and immediately fired up my laptop and began e-mailing the picture of the nurse and the little girl to the contacts that I’d made at the Bay Area hospitals. With luck, someone would recognize her and I’d have my first real break in my investigation.

I blasted a Lean Cuisine in the microwave and picked at it while watching one mindless situation comedy after another,
mindless
being the key word.

I’d put myself in a primetime TV trance, turning off my mind for a few hours so my brain could work in the background, rendering the horrific images I’d seen that day, stripping them of their emotional impact, and filing them for detached analysis.

After two hours of snappy insults, wacky neighbors, bright lights, and computer-generated laughter, I shuffled off to bed and immediately fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

 

Getting up in the morning took a conscious effort. I felt like my entire body was encased in concrete. I took a hot shower that bordered on scalding, drank a gallon of coffee sweetened with a pound of sugar, and avoided the newspaper. I wasn’t ready to read about the homicide scene that I’d experienced firsthand, or any number of atrocities worldwide that I was lucky enough to have missed.

Instead I went to my laptop to see if anybody had replied to my e-mail blast. I had one response from Dr. Everett Long, a pediatrician at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, who said that he recognized the nurse and was willing to meet me to discuss it.

I was excited by the news but it pissed me off a little, too. Why couldn’t he just tell me who she was? Why did he have to hold back the information until we met? What was there to discuss that he couldn’t simply tell me in an e-mail?

I sent him a quick reply, letting him know that I would be in touch soon to set up a time to meet. I was hoping there would be no immediate developments in the couch case, that Monk wouldn’t need me, and that I could see Dr. Long that morning, but those hopes were quashed when my cell phone rang.

It was Captain Stottlemeyer, who wanted to see us right away in his office. At least I wouldn’t be starting the day off with another corpse.

I picked up Monk and we headed downtown. On the way, I asked him how he’d spent his night. He told me that he’d had a very relaxing evening emptying his kitchen cabinets and cleaning them. I’m sure that he had been just as zoned out cleaning as I’d been while watching those lousy sitcoms, and probably for the same reason. At least he had something to show for it.

We found Stottlemeyer and Devlin in the captain’s office. He was leaning back in his desk chair and she was sitting on his beaten-up vinyl couch. They were both wearing the same clothes we’d seen them in yesterday and looked like they hadn’t slept at all.

“You two should get some rest,” I said.

“After we catch this guy,” Stottlemeyer said, rubbing his eyes.

“Are you any closer?”

Stottlemeyer glanced at Devlin, who took that as her cue.

“We know everything except where we can find him,” Devlin said. “And I owe you an apology, Monk.”

“I knew you’d realize the importance of flossing and good dental hygiene,” Monk said.

“I’m talking about the case,” she said. “You were right. It’s all about the couch. Cheryl Strauss donated the couch to the thrift shop when she moved from a larger place to her smaller, current residence. Mark Costa bought the couch from the thrift store a few weeks later with his credit card, a transaction that was logged in the thrift shop’s computer.”

“So what was in the couch?” I asked.

“That’s where it gets interesting,” Stottlemeyer said. “It turns out Cheryl Strauss’ ex-boyfriend is Rico Ramirez, a nasty piece of work with a long history of violent assaults, most recently jumping diamond merchants, beating them nearly to death, and taking their stones. He got nabbed and was sent to prison five years ago, but most of the diamonds from his last job were never found, about half a million dollars’ worth. Now we know where they were.”

“Cheryl Strauss had no idea she was sitting on a fortune in diamonds when she gave away that couch,” Devlin said. “But you can imagine how pissed off Rico was when he got out of prison two weeks ago, looked her up, and found out his stash was gone.”

“How did Ramirez get out of prison so soon?” Monk asked.

Stottlemeyer sighed and tapped a file on his desk. “He was paroled as part of the settlement in a class action lawsuit leveled by the ACLU against the state over the extreme overcrowding and inhumane conditions in our prisons.”

“Apparently, a prison sentence is supposed to be like an extended vacation at Club Med,” Devlin said. “The next thing you know, the ACLU is going to say it’s a human rights violation if prisoners don’t have satellite television, Jacuzzis in their cells, and meals prepared by Gordon Ramsey.”

Monk rolled his shoulders. “Why did Ramirez kill Cheryl Strauss?”

“I’m glad you asked,” Stottlemeyer said. “We’ve got a couple of possibilities to run by you. Here’s one: she tells Ramirez that she gave the couch away. He goes after it, kills Costa, and rips up the couch. But the diamonds aren’t there and then it hits him—he’s just killed the one guy who could have told him where they are. That was a dumb move and it really hurt.”

“More for Costa than for Ramirez,” I said.

“But Ramirez isn’t the kind of guy who takes disappointment well or can live with looking like a fool. He’d want to make somebody pay,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s too late to do anything more to Costa, so he goes back to see Cheryl and takes his fury out on her. That’s scenario number one.”

“For scenario number two, we’ve got to go back to what’s going through Ramirez’s mind when he’s ripping up Costa’s couch and doesn’t find the diamonds,” Devlin said. “He’s thinking, yeah, maybe Costa found them and hid them someplace. Or maybe Cheryl lied to him, maybe she found the diamonds years ago and sent him off on a pointless search and is laughing her ass off right now. The more he thinks about it, the more he believes Cheryl has screwed him. So he goes back to her place, tortures her until she reveals where she’s hidden the diamonds, and then kills her. Now he’s out there someplace with a fortune in diamonds he’s got to fence.”

Monk nodded. “Both theories make sense. It could be either one.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured,” Stottlemeyer said. “It doesn’t really matter at this point which theory is correct. We know Ramirez is our guy. We just have to find him.”

“What can I do to help?” Monk asked.

“You’ve done your job, Monk. The mystery is solved. We know how and why these three people were killed. All that’s left now is for us to chase the guy down.”

It sounded easier said than done to me. “How are you going to do that?”

“We’ve got a list of his known associates and previous haunts,” Devlin said. “Plus, if he’s got the diamonds and wants to convert them into cash, he’s going to have to fence them. We’ve got our eye on the fences with the connections to pull that off.”

“Maybe he’s left San Francisco by now,” I said.

“That’s possible, and we’ve put the word out to other law enforcement agencies,” Stottlemeyer said. “But my guess is that he’s going to hunker down on familiar turf.”

“It’s also mine,” Devlin said. “If he’s hiding on these streets, I will flush him out and take him down.”

I had no doubt that she would. She actually seemed excited about it. No doubt she was happy to finally be working in her comfort zone, one far outside of Monk’s.

“We’ll let you know how it goes,” Stottlemeyer said. That was his polite way of throwing us out of his office so they could get back to work.

I was glad to be done with the case and relieved that there were no other homicides demanding Monk’s attention or my own. It meant that I could concentrate on solving the mystery of Jack Griffin.

Monk was already restless by the time we got to the car. “What are we going to do today?”

“We’ve just come off a couple intense days of investigating three back-to-back murders. I think we can take the day off.”

“What would I do with a day off?”

“You could relax,” I said.

“What are you going to do?”

“This and that.”

“I could do this and that with you.”

The last thing I wanted was Monk joining me on my investigation because then it wouldn’t be mine anymore. He’d solve it in five minutes.

“I’ve got a lot of errands to run that I haven’t had a chance to do for a while.”

“I like errands, especially if there’s a list of tasks that must be completed.”

“Okay, great. Let’s make a list. Our first stop is Macy’s. My bras are getting pretty ragged and I need a couple of new ones, maybe some panties, too. Then we can swing by Rite Aid and pick up a new razor for my legs, some skin cream, and I’m running low on tampons—”

Monk covered up his ears. “Never mind. Drop me off. You didn’t say it would be those kinds of this and that.”

“What do you mean?”

“The activities women are supposed to do on their own, in secret and in silence, preferably in the dead of night.”

I’d achieved my goal, but I couldn’t resist challenging him, only because it might create suspicion if I didn’t.

“I’m not ashamed that I need undergarments and toiletries, Mr. Monk. Would you prefer women went without them?”

“I’d prefer never to hear about it,” Monk said.

“Like pregnancy and birth,” I said.

Monk shuddered. “It’s sickening.”

“It’s magical,” I said.

“As long as you don’t have to see it, think about it, or experience it.”

“We’ve all experienced it, Mr. Monk. How do you think you got here?”

“I don’t think about it,” Monk said. “But I have been trying hard to forget it.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

D
r. Everett Long’s office in the pediatric department was barely larger than a closet and was stuffed with files. He sat behind a chipped wooden desk and was wearing a starched white lab coat with his name embroidered on its breast pocket. He had a stethoscope draped around his neck, though it seemed to me that he wore it more like a fashion accessory than as a necessary tool of his trade.

He was an old man, his wrinkled skin making his face look like a melting wax mask that was slowly dripping off his skull. His bifocals were perched on the edge of his bulbous nose as he squinted at the original photograph of the nurse and her daughter, then up at me, sitting across the desk from him.

“What do you want to know about her?” he asked, handing me back the photo.

“Her name, for starters, and anything else you can tell me.” The office was so cramped that my knees were pressed against the front of his desk.

“Her name was Stacey O’Quinn and she was a nurse here with me in the pediatric department for two or three years. I think it was around 1980. All the years tend to blur together when you get to be my age.”

I wrote her name on my notepad, not because I was afraid that I would forget it, but because I needed to force myself to remain calm and professional. What I really wanted to do was cheer and stomp my feet over my first real bit of progress.

“What can you tell me about Stacey?”

“She was a hard worker, great with kids, but didn’t socialize much with the staff, so nobody knew that much about her life at first. Turns out she didn’t know too much about it, either.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Hold your horses,” he said irritably. “I’m getting to that.”

I didn’t think my question was out of line, but I was beginning to understand why he’d summoned me across the bay to Berkeley. He wanted an audience, someone to talk to. I wondered how long he’d been stuck in that closet, ignored by the rest of the staff, craving some attention. I’d just have to be patient and play my part. I could do that.

“I’m sorry, Doctor, please go on.”

“All we really knew about Stacey, outside of her work, was that she was married, had a five-year-old daughter, lived in a new house out in Walnut Creek, and took BART into Berkeley every day. Then her husband was killed.”

I took the momentary silence as my cue to ask the required question to spur him along. “What happened?”

“His name was Walter O’Quinn and he was an insurance salesman by trade. I only know that, and everything else I’m about to tell you, because of what I read in the papers later. Anyway, he was something of a boating enthusiast, and one weekday morning, while his wife was working and their daughter, Rose, was in school, he took the day off and went out sailing.”

As soon as Dr. Long mentioned boating, my pulse quickened. Jack Griffin worked around boats, too. There was a question I was dying to ask, but I forced myself to bide my time, not to jump ahead, to let the doctor spin his tale at his own pace.

“He told some friends at the marina that he was taking a little jaunt out toward the Farrallon Islands, which are about twenty-five miles outside the Golden Gate,” Dr. Long continued. “It was a nice day, clear skies, calm seas, no reason for concern. Some fellow sailors he knew saw him trailing a school of dolphins about fifteen miles out. He waved at his friends and had a big smile on his face, a man at peace with the world.”

I could guess what Dr. Long was building up to, and it made my question only more urgent. But I bit my tongue. Literally. If I’d bitten it any harder, it would have bled.

“But when he didn’t come back by nightfall, Stacey called the coast guard. They mounted a massive search-and-rescue mission, but no sign of the boat was found. No wreckage, no life vests, nothing.”

“And no body, either?”

That was the question I was so eager to ask, but I already knew what the answer would be.

“Nope,” Dr. Long said.

Call me cynical, but at that moment, I thought I had a pretty good idea who Jack Griffin really was. I wrote
Walter O’Quinn
down on my notepad, circled it, and underlined it twice.

“You said something about Stacey not really knowing who she was,” I said.

“No, that’s not what I said. Check your notes. What I said was that she didn’t know much about her life. There’s a difference.”

“I stand corrected.”

“After her husband drowned, she discovered that his business had gone belly-up, that they were massively in debt, and that their boat and their house were about to be seized by the bank. Her life was a sham, only she didn’t know it. The whole story was in the papers.”

I made a note to look up the articles on the Internet.

“So Walter committed suicide,” I said, though I already knew that wasn’t true.

“Nobody could prove it, but whether he did or not, the presumption was strong enough that the insurance company negated his life insurance policy,” Dr. Long said. “One day, Stacey simply packed up her things, yanked her daughter out of school, and left.”

“To go where?”

Dr. Long shrugged. “Nobody has heard from or seen her since. That was over twenty years ago.”

“Do you think she could still be in the Bay Area?”

“Could be,” he said. “Or she could be in Madagascar for all I know. What difference does it make now?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But I think it was important to the man who died a few days ago.”

“You think he was Walter O’Quinn, don’t you?”

“He was an American with false identification who worked on boats down in Mexico . . . and he was holding this picture when he died,” I held it up again to underscore my point. “Either he was Walter O’Quinn or someone with close ties to him.”

“It’s a mystery,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” I said and stood up. “Thank you so much for your help, Doctor.”

“Will you let me know how it all turns out?”

I smiled. “Of course I will.”

But when I did, I’d be sure to take my sweet time revealing the solution.

 

I was only a few blocks from Julie’s dorm, and if I was a good mother, I would have stopped by to see her. But the truth is, I was far too caught up in the case. I wouldn’t be able to sit still through a cup of coffee, much less an entire meal, knowing the answers to my questions might be within my grasp.

I’d learned from my experiences with Monk that there’s a certain momentum to a case and you need to ride it. If you don’t, the clues can evaporate like dew in the morning sun.

I went to my car, keeping my eyes out for Julie or any of her friends, though the likelihood of running into her or any of them was slim. I felt like a cheating spouse and got an inkling why Captain Stottlemeyer’s first marriage crumbled. How many days or nights had he done the same thing, and felt the same way, while working a case? How many times did he choose a case over his family?

But I rationalized that it wasn’t the same thing for me. My daughter was an adult now. I was single. I was under no obligation to visit her just because I was near her home.

Of course, that rationalization didn’t work at all. It would have helped if I’d had some Oreo cookie ice cream to eat at the same time. I’ve learned that self-delusion is much easier when there’s something sweet in your mouth.

Once I got inside my car, I hunched down in the driver’s seat, opened the file that Yuki had given me, and scanned the list of Dalander Homes developments until I found the one that they’d built in Walnut Creek. I jotted down the cross streets that formed the boundary of the development and headed east into the suburban badlands on the other side of the Caldecott Tunnel.

By the 1980s, nearly all of the walnut groves that gave the town its name had been plowed under for housing tracts with names like Walnut Walk, Walnut Acres, and Walnut Grove so people would at least know what had once been there.

By the 1990s, the once quaint downtown was all but demolished, too, replaced with an idealized, decidedly upscale take on small-town America, one where Tiffany, Apple, and Gucci were the local merchants.

The Dalander tract was at the end of Walnut Avenue, where all the streets were inexplicably named after Indian tribes. I drove around the neighborhood, past Kiowa Court and Cheyenne Drive, thinking it would be hard to find the house, but it turned out to be surprisingly easy.

As much as Walnut Creek had changed, the house on the corner of Comanche Court and Cochise Way had not. The O’Quinn residence was still the same color, the bushes and trees planted in the same places where their pots were set in the picture. The only difference was the grass where the dirt had been and the Mercedes SUV parked in the driveway.

I parked my car at the corner and, holding the photo in my hand, stood in the exact spot where Stacey and her daughter posed for the camera, which, I presumed, Walter had been holding.

It was creepy.

I knew a lot more about “Jack Griffin” and the photo than I had a few days ago, but what I’d learned had only deepened the mystery surrounding his death.

If he was Walter O’Quinn and had faked his own death, was it to avoid his creditors and provide for his family with the proceeds of his life insurance policy? Or did he flee to avoid the shame and responsibility? I was beginning to think it was more about avoiding embarrassment than seeing to it that his family was taken care of. Otherwise, he would have faked his death in a way that looked more accidental than suicidal. But to be fair to Walter, perhaps he just lacked the ingenuity and creativity to do it right. Few of us have the skills required to convincingly fake our accidental deaths.

But assuming he was Walter, and by this point I was convinced that he was, why did he come back to San Francisco to die? Was it to reconnect with the family he’d abandoned? If so, where were Stacey and her daughter now? Did they even know he was here?

“Can I help you?”

The female voice startled me. I whirled around to see a woman standing right beside me, holding a leash that led down to a docile little Jack Russell terrier.

The woman was wearing a faded and paint-stained Northgate High School sweatshirt and an old pair of jeans, her long hair tied into a ponytail that gave her a girlish look that belied her age, which I pegged at about her mid-fifties.

“Sorry, you caught me by surprise,” I said.

“I didn’t mean to. You did seem pretty deep in thought about something.”

“Have you lived in this neighborhood for a while?”

She gestured to the house on the opposite corner of the cul-de-sac. It was an Inglenook floor plan, like the O’Quinn home, but with rock in the facade where the O’Quinn home had brick.

“We built the house in 1979,” she said. “It was one of the last empty lots in the development.”

“So you must have known the O’Quinns.”

“My God, you people never give up. I thought I’d seen the last of their bill collectors years ago.”

“I’m not a bill collector. My name is Natalie Teeger. I’m a private investigator.” I surprised myself with that remark and hoped it didn’t show on my face. I was a PI now? “I’m trying to locate the family of a man who died in San Francisco a few days ago. He had this in his hand.”

I held the photo out to her. She stared at it for a long moment. “That’s Stacey and Rose. We were putting in our landscaping at the same time, so this must have been taken in the fall of 1979. That station wagon was brand-new. They were so proud of it. You would have thought it was a Rolls-Royce the way they fawned over it.”

I suddenly wished I’d had the forethought to bring along Jack Griffin’s fake ID to see if she could identify him as Walter O’Quinn. Some private eye I was.

“May I ask you your name?” I asked.

“Gloria Hayworth,” she replied.

“Do you know where the O’Quinns went, Mrs. Hayworth?”

She shook her head. “After Walter drowned, the poor woman was grief stricken. It’s bad enough to lose your husband, but then the bill collectors swooped down on her like a pack of wolves. It was relentless. They’d come at all hours of the day and night, pounding on her door, demanding money. They even went around to the neighbors, telling us all that Stacey was a deadbeat, hoping we’d shame her into writing them a check. My husband, a very peaceable man, got so upset that he slugged one of them.”

“Good for him,” I said.

“It’s the only time I ever saw Roger raise his hand to anybody. They were despicable people. I didn’t blame him for it and I certainly didn’t blame her for what she did.”

“Did she hit one of them, too?”

“No, but she finally cracked. One night, she and Rose ran off, leaving the front door unlocked and all of her keys, credit cards, and ID behind. I like to think she escaped to somewhere else and started fresh, though some people around believed that maybe she and Rose followed Walter into the sea.”

“That’s a horrible thing to say.”

“Open the newspaper, honey. People do horrible things every day. How many times have you read about mothers strapping their kids into their car seats, then driving off a cliff?”

“But she was a nurse,” I said.

“Makes no difference. Everybody has a breaking point.” Mrs. Hayworth said it like she had some personal experience to back her statement up, but it was none of my business and I didn’t pursue it.

“So what happened after Stacey and Rose disappeared?”

“The bank took the house and sold it. The bill collectors kept coming for a while, then finally gave up. Or maybe they found her somewhere and squeezed every last penny out of her. I don’t know.”

“Has anyone else come looking for the O’Quinns lately?”

“Not that I’ve noticed, but I’m not the neighborhood snoop.” Mrs. Hayworth pointed to a two-story house across the street that faced the opening of the cul-de-sac. “That’d be Beverly Lundeen. But I have to warn you, she’s two beers short of a six-pack.” Mrs. Hayworth waved at the house. “Hello, Bev—I see you.”